Tim Forcum: New Paintings
July 27 – August 30, 2013
Reception for the artist Saturday July 27 6 – 8pm

Western Project is proud to present a new body of paintings by Los Angeles artist, Tim Forcum. Heavily influenced by the works of Lee Mullican and Dynaton artists such as Gordon Onslow Ford, Forcum uses a personal pictorial language to describe a transcendental experience of nature. With suggestions of landscape and figuration, the artist also recalls historic modes of abstraction; the cubist faceting of the early 20th century is played reductively and subdivided in his eccentric compositions. Forcum embraces history to speak of the same organic wonders of the world as his predecessors. Not as just a formal language, but a metaphoric, alternative reality. Different from the luminous and visionary Southern California landscapes of Frederick Wight, Forcum’s work looks to describe the mystical yet universal; a micro/macro vision using naturalistic forms and abstract patterns. It is the rhythm and structure of his shapes which allude to the unseen; a suggestion of form and shadow, or movement implied by a scraped palette knife or a surrealistic inversion of color and forms. His surfaces range from highly burnished to scratchy, a kind of impolite yet seductive, methodical interplay, mirroring his painting process of moving back and forth between spontaneity and calculation. Each work contains an individual logic, sometimes recognizable, often more a subjective knowledge structured and fragile; or perhaps each work a mapping; space behind the physical plane, a seeing of the unconscious, or the unseen dance of the universe.

Forcum has previously shown at D.E.N. Gallery, Pharmaka Art, WEEKEND and the Zero One Gallery in Los Angeles, California. He has shown in conjunction with the Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, California, also in San Francisco, Palm Springs and Barcelona. His work has been reviewed in Flash Art, The Los Angeles Times, Art Ltd., Coagula Art Journal, LA Weekly, Tema Celeste Contemporary Art and many more publications. He is an MFA graduate of California Sate University Fullerton.